Downing Street's Leveson proposals should be welcomed – with one major caveat

Downing Street's proposal for a new system of press regulation based on a royal charter (unveiled in Parliament by Maria Miller yesterday) has a good deal to recommend it. It would create an independent recognition panel that would, in effect, regulate the regulator, and sets out various conditions that the new press regulator would have to satisfy if it is to meet with the panel's approval – conditions that would guarantee the regulator remains independent of both the government and the newspaper industry. It would create various incentives for newspapers and news magazines to sign up to the new regulator, such as access to an arbitral process whereby civil legal claims could be resolved quickly and inexpensively. But it wouldn't threaten those organisations with being regulated by Ofcom if they declined to subscribe. It would also grant the regulator the power to impose fines of up to a million pounds on those papers and magazines that do sign up. In short, it embodies the vast majority of Lord Justice Leveson's recommendations while avoiding the most sinister of them – in particular, the "statutory underpinning" that defenders of press freedom are so concerned about.

The six million dollar question is whether this proposal can form the basis for cross-party agreement and the answer, according to most seasoned commentators, is yes. Labour huffed and puffed about introducing its own Leveson Bill back in December, but Harriet Harman has discreetly dropped this threat and yesterday said she was willing to discuss the proposal at cross-party talks this Thursday. The Lib Dems, too, have retreated from their earlier hardline position (implement Leveson's recommendations in full). Yesterday, Nick Clegg said that while a Leveson Act is still his preferred option, it was imperative to reach cross-party agreement.

The press has cautiously welcomed the proposal. The Mail was generally positive in an editorial this morning, lauding David Cameron as a man of principle among pygmies. It expresses reservations about the fact that the press won't be adequately represented on the board of the new independent regulator – dismissing the board members as "quangocrats" – but describes the proposal as "the least bad option".

McCann went on to complain that Downing Street had made "a host of concessions to newspaper editors and proprietors", but the proposal doesn't read that way to me. In particular, it includes one of Leveson's most pernicious recommendations, namely, that the new independent regulator should be “granted the power” to hear complaints from “a representative group affected by the alleged breach, or a third party seeking to ensure accuracy of published information”. As I wrote in a blog post last month, this measure will have a chilling effect on press freedom:

It constitutes a gold-embossed invitation to the self-appointed guardians of various beleaguered minorities to bombard the regulator with endless complaints about articles in which this or that victim group has, in their eyes, been unfairly treated. The regulator will feel obliged to take these complaints seriously and that means passing them on to the editor of the offending newspaper or magazine who will, in turn, pass them on to the transgressing journalist. Said hack will then have to spend days – even weeks – piecing together a defence in case the complaint is upheld and their career ruined. Faced with such a prospect, it will be a brave journalist who risks writing anything remotely controversial about any subject likely to foul afoul of these busy bodies – immigration, multi-culturalism, gay marriage, etc.

I don't suppose the representatives of the press have much negotiating room left, given that both Harman and Clegg will be looking for a tightening up of Downing Street's recommendations in order to make their acceptance of the royal charter look like less of a climbdown. But I hope they move heaven and earth to get this clause removed. As long as it remains, I will be urging my masters at the Spectator, where I'm an associate editor, not to sign up to the new system of regulation.